Electronic devices, including portable electronic devices, have gained widespread use and may provide a variety of functions including, for example, telephonic, electronic messaging and other personal information manager (PIM) application functions. Portable electronic devices comprise several types of devices including mobile stations such as simple cellular telephones, smart telephones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), tablet computers, and laptop computers, that may have wireless network communications or near-field communications connectivity such as Bluetooth® capabilities. In addition, electronic devices are also widely used in personal entertainment and infotainment systems, for example, portable media players and automobile infotainment systems.
The popularity of electronic devices is driven by user experiences and the interaction between people and the devices via user interfaces. User Interfaces (UIs) that are user friendly and intuitive, functional and stylish, vivid and life-like drive the attractiveness of the device to a consumer.
Improvements in the method of generating and presenting user interfaces are desirable.
In some UI systems, several applications, each requiring display of their respective UI elements, will communicate with one rendering engine responsible for determining the layout of elements. Determining the correct layout often requires negotiation between the rendering engine and the applications, that is the rendering engine queries the applications for more information. If the rendering engine has to wait for the negotiation to complete before rendering the UI then the rendering engine may stall.